Long time no see!

I went a bit underground after leaving Mozilla as an employee. Now that I am situated in my new role, I can talk a little bit more about what I am doing and how it will relate to Mozilla.

I am currently at Facebook and recently graduated bootcamp. I’m on the Release Engineering team with Chuck Rossi working on release related things. Right now I help out with the Facebook.com web releases but I’ll be moving into mobile (Android, iOS, mobile web, etc) shortly. It’s pretty cool to see how a company the size of Facebook deals with releasing how often they do, the scope of their frontend and backend systems, and the tools and processes they have in place. Once I start working on mobile, I am absolutely giddy I get to work with Mike Shaver again.

So what does this mean for Mozilla? A lot! I’ve been missing-in-action, waiting for legal approval to work on Mozilla stuff. Now that I have that approval, I should be around more and more. Here’s a list off the top of my head of what I intend to work on in my “spare” time:

Making it so source migration is as easy as pushing a button. I started this work before I left but based on the time it took Alex and I to struggle through the last migration it’s clear that it isn’t nearly good enough. I intend to expand my hacky merge tool to make it solid

I have Bugzilla improvements I have committed to. Some even have patches. I have promised to finish them and I will do so. I know the benefit to Mozillians is great but quite honestly it is hard to motivate myself to work on Bugzilla without feeling the benefit personally. Plus, I have no desire to subject myself to Perl anymore…and that’s coming from a guy who works in PHP now (ugh). That being said, I will finish what I started and help the Mozilla community in this way as much as I can

Usable, generic release management tools. Every company I know has tools to track what is/isn’t in a branch, overlay interesting events on the repo graph, perform cherry picks / transplant between release branches, etc. I intend to write some reusable components I can use at Facebook as well as Mozilla

Help with mediawiki-bugzilla. I started the project as a proof of concept and it’s been great to see Lawrence and Jake Maul get it actually used in production. The project is so useful and so simple I’ll probably hack on it in my spare time to let off some steam. Plus, Facebook has a lot of PHP so I guess I’ll feel a little bit more at home working on this codebase. Any web developer looking to contribute to Mozilla / open source should take a look at this project…high impact (a lot of open source projects use MediaWiki and Bugzilla), super simple code base, accessible language with no real external dependencies, and very little development red tape (just a pull request on GitHub!)

Channel triage. I actually enjoy triage and I want to take the load off of Alex and others so they can do “real” work during their day. I have some ideas for tools and processes to help out but I plan to triage at least 3 times a week or so…it helps me go to sleep when my mind is racing. First, I need to make sure I have all the proper Bugzilla access but then I will be acting as the Triage Fairy™ as much as possible

Mozilla Pulse. I fumbled the handoff (sorry guys!) but I intend to push Pulse forward as much as I can

I won’t be working on Mozilla stuff in any official Facebook capacity, but I’ll be around as much as I can in my personal time. I’m excited!